One Bullet Dodged. The people of France today rejected the proposed new constitution for the European Union. Since that constitution cannot go into effect, by its own terms, without unanimous ratification, it is effectively rejected Union-wide. Good.
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France's leadership, along with Germany's, has long been nearly obsessed with creating a European superpower first to rival, then replace the United States on the world stage. They have resented the decline of Europe from the "glory days" of old, when European countries conquered almost the entire planet. If, divided, Europe was able to conquer almost the entire planet, what might they do if truly united?
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Let's review. European empires imposed their rule, their economics, their languages, and, in some measure, their religion, Western Christianity, upon thousands of disparate peoples all around this planet. Europeans eager to retake the world stage ignore or trivialize the violence that the colonializing project required, the suffering of hundreds of millions under the colonial yoke, and the loss of many ancestral cultures inundated by outside influences.
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They also dismiss the fact that European colonization also brought black slavery, as Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and, most particularly, Portugal moved tens of millions of people from Africa to populate their New World colonies and labor in their fields. An unknowable, but large, fraction of the people kidnapped from Africa died on the voyage to America.
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Africa itself was reduced to colonial rule rather late in the game, and for much of the continent, the colonial period lasted scarcely more than one normal human lifespan, 60 to 80 years. The after-effects, however, persist.
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Much of sub-Saharan Africa's ruling elite continues to immerse itself in the culture and economics of its former overlords. They have embraced neo-colonialism, in the Lomé Convention, which ties African (and some Caribbean and Pacific) economies into the European Union. European companies and governments gladly do business with kleptocracies on kleptocrats' own terms, reinforcing economic unfairness, governmental corruption, and political repression across much of the continent.
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European militaries (but especially France) regularly intrude on one side or another of local conflicts, not always to the good.
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But perhaps worst, much of the continent's ruling and cultural elites still speak French and Portuguese, look to the metropolitan countries from which those languages sprang, and teach those increasingly useless languages to their children, wasting enormous educational resources they cannot afford on languages that can do little to advance their most basic interests. Africa needs modernization and democratization. It needs English, and especially American English.
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Europeans haven't learned from their own history, that overreaching weakens, not strengthens.
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They have enlarged what used to be called and conceived of, modestly and sensibly, as a Common Market, and reinvented it into an aspiring superstate in which all its constituent cultures would somehow meld into a new "European" identity, cohesive and universal. Such a project was dubious even when the core six countries — France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — created the Common Market (formally, "European Economic Community"). Between them, they spoke four major languages, from two language families, Romance and Germanic, plus a number of minor dialects.
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The superstate project became more dubious when the Common Market started adding other countries, and other languages. At first, all the new members were Western Christian, and all the languages were Western European. More recently, however, the renamed and reconceived "European Union", with its new sense of self-importance and new mission, expanded into Eastern Europe.
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It admitted members who not only speak Greek, Slavic languages, Baltic languages, and Ural-Altaic languages, but also some that adhere to Eastern Orthodox churches. And all of them have linguistic and religious minorities, including a significant admixture of Moslems.
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Then the EU opened negotiations to admit Turkey, 70 million Moslems. That seems to have been a step too far.
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The heart of the project, France, snapped, and its people said, "That's enuf for now."
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Are the current 25 members of the EU going to find a way to create a superstate, even without a common language? Will the millennium-long division between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity become as trivial as the Catholic-Protestant split is for many modern Europeans?
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Will the EU continue to enlarge under its current rules? If so, will that enlargement revive superpower ambitions, or will the "Union" be so dilute and riven by divisions that any chance it might have had of challenging the U.S. for world primacy has vanished?
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I suspect that the European-superpower project never stood a chance, at least not without a common language, and France would never permit the EU to adopt the obvious choice of common language — English — first because its overweening pride in its own language would not permit that humiliation and second because an English-speaking EU would be unlikely to see the English-speaking U.S. as its worst enemy.
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Major powers seem to need enemies to justify aggressive behavior toward others. We have Iraq, Afghanistan, and Islamism, for the moment. We face China in the not-so-distant future. We don't need Europe snapping at our heels.
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In rejecting a tighter structure for the European Union, the people of France have made a worthy contribution to world peace and proved again that they are a good friend to the American people. Merci bien.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,657.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:04 PM